Expect these fantasy players to gain — or lose — the most targets in 2019

Opportunity is king in fantasy football. Or, to put it another way, you catch none of the targets you don’t see.

While player skill plays a critical part in analysis, the extent of a receiver’s opportunity is something with which to familiarize yourself. Ability and preseason player performance will help a lot of that fall into place, but there are ways to measure the extent of the opportunity a player could potentially receive.

One of those is to examine each team’s target totals from the previous season to see which of the players who accumulated them might’ve left the team during the offseason and therefore freed some up for others, as well as which players might’ve been brought in to soak up some of those left behind. This isn’t a new concept; it has often been discussed in the fantasy football industry as “vacated targets.”cheap nike nfl jerseys paypal7

This isn’t an exact science. Injuries have a bearing on the past season’s statistics. For example, Jacksonville Jaguars receiver Marqise Lee missed the entire 2018 season and therefore contributed nothing in the category after earning 103 and 96 targets the two previous seasons, but he will surely rejoin the team this season and absorb a significant amount.nfl nike jerseys cheap china

Regression to the mean of a team’s target total can also have an impact, such as with the Indianapolis Colts, who saw a 157-pass-attempt increase from 2017 to ’18, which, while understandable to a degree with Andrew Luck back healthy and under center, still gave the team its largest total in the category in four years and second largest in any of Luck’s six healthy seasons.